Over the past few days, the Taliban has shifted from sweeping through largely rural districts to contesting larger urban areas and important provincial capitals—Herat, Kandahar, and Lashkar Gah, where the Taliban appears to have seized nine of the city’s ten districts with only the government center, reinforced apparently with units from Kabul and U.S. airstrikes, barely holding on.

The Taliban will likely find that urban areas fall less quickly and less easily to their forces than the rural areas they have taken so far. But the group’s rapid resurgence over the past few months raises the prospect that Afghanistan will collapse much more quickly than the Biden administration appears to have expected when it announced its withdrawal deadline of September 11. As one anonymous senior Defense Department official told Politico, “I . . . don’t think anyone thought Afghanistan would turn so badly so quick.”…

The second- and third-order consequences are creating yet more difficulties for the administration. If, as seems likely, the worst is yet to come, then the administration is right (if disastrously tardy) to focus on evacuating the Afghans who, in whatever capacity, worked with the United States effort over the past twenty years. This is not only a moral obligation, a debt of honor to those who fought by our side in a noble cause. (The frustrating and often inconsistent American prosecution of the war only accentuates their bravery.) It is also a practical imperative: Who around the world will want to work with the United States in difficult conflicts if we allow our partners to be slaughtered like sheep?